One of the most common assumptions that a business owner will make about backups is that their web hosting company or web developer is doing backups for them. Yes, they often are, but from my experience over the years, I’ve discovered that the backups are rarely complete or recent enough to be worthwhile. Often when a business owner goes to rely on a backup, something is broken or missing, and they’ve lost some critical information.
For business owners, not having decent website backups is extremely foolish, as invariably, your business will depend on your website. You can’t afford for your website to be down for more than 1-2 days at the very most.
This is why I always recommend creating a secondary backup (or at least a very robust primary backup).
There are some free and paid WordPress plugins that will create a copy of your WordPress website, but they actually store a copy of the backup on your web server. So if your website has been attacked, then the database and files could potentially have been compromised, including your backups.
The best solution is to have a daily backup that stores your files/data in a completely separate location, usually on a different server that’s protected.
If you have just one or two websites
- VaultPress – built by the commercial team behind WordPress itself, this is a very robust and solid backup system. It’s also really great if you’re not particularly technical, as their teams really look after you. You can also get help restoring a backup if needed. Starts at $3 a month per website.
If you have 3 or more websites or you’re more technical
- ManageWP – this is a suite that allows you to monitor and manage your websites in one place. They offer an option to do daily backups of your websites for around $2 per website per month.
If you have business-grade hosting (e.g. FlyWheel, WPEngine, WPX, SiteGround, etc)
If you use a high quality web hosting service (read the hosting FAQ), then they’ll offer high quality backups as part of their offering. So you won’t need to use an external backup tool.
If you really must use a WordPress plugin
- If you really really really want to use a WordPress plugin for backups, BackupBuddy is a particularly good backup plugin. It’s very robust, deals with lots of server types, and you can store backups on Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. However, you do need to have technical skills to use it.